As a conductor I have always stayed away from Turandot, but as a boy I certainly played it – and all the other Puccini operas – on the piano for my father, who was a singer and a voice teacher. I used to feel that Turandot didn’t have the melodramatic pull of his other operas, not least Manon Lescaut, Tosca or The Girl of the Golden West.
Now, however, I’ve started to think about it in a completely different way and, after more than 30 years of conducting Puccini’s works around the world, this week at the Royal Opera House I’m tackling it on stage for the first time. I have just recorded it, too, also for the first time, with the orchestra and chorus of Santa Cecilia. Why have I waited this long?
Turandot is Puccini’s last opera, left unfinished at his death. It’s almost an archetypal tale. In China, a sphinx-like princess, Turandot, sets her suitors three riddles they must solve in order to win her hand in marriage. If they fail to answer correctly she has them executed. Calaf is the man who will solve the riddles and win the hand (and eventually the heart) of this ice queen. He sets Turandot a riddle of his own: if she can guess his name, he will forfeit his life. The slave girl Liù is in love with Calaf and sacrifices herself for him.
Turandot is quite unlike Puccini’s other operas. It’s a ceremony. He called it a “fable”. So much of its rhythm is ritualistic in nature: it’s full of marches and ceremonial manifestations, and the dramatic situations have this quality as well. Yet he also included music in complete contrast to these elements. Alongside the more romantic music that we expect for the lead tenor, the soprano Liù, or Turandot herself, there’s a commedia dell’arte element that cleanses the palate from the dark, bloodthirsty and yearning music all around it.
This score is in fact a snapshot of everything that was going on in music in the early 20th century. This was one of the most fertile periods of artistic creation of all time, with innumerable threads heading in different directions simultaneously. You hear in Turandot echoes of Stravinsky, Debussy, the romantic side of Schoenberg, Szymanowski, Korngold, the world of Strauss’s Salome and Elektra. Puccini’s score embraces all of this and emerges as a very sophisticated but Italian hybrid, a wonderful musical treasure trove. When I started to think of it that way, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
As in his earlier opera, Madama Butterfly, there is a far eastern quality to the musical soundscape that conjures his vision of ancient China. Supplied with some indigenous Chinese melodies, Puccini devised whole environments around them; they also inspired him to create a new harmonic language for this work.
Turandot’s bones are bigger than in any of his other operas: the chorus plays a larger role, the orchestra is larger, and Puccini is constantly reaching for an epic quality. In most of his other operas, it’s the intimacy, the small ensembles, that are most crucial. But here the set pieces with chorus are the main feature and it is these that make this opera so popular – the sheer spectacle of so many people on stage.
The musical problem hanging over the whole work, nevertheless, is the final duet between Turandot and Calaf. Here Puccini found himself in a situation he’d never faced before. This climactic duet is supposed to be celebratory, but the princess Turandot is no sweet ingenue waiting for the heroic tenor to give her life meaning. Cruel and bloodthirsty, she has sworn to avenge the rape and murder of an ancestress, and vowed that no man will ever possess her. She needs to convince us that she has exorcised this, and wants only to give herself to Calaf and supply the opera with its conventionally happy ending.
Puccini was not used to this type of psychological exploration, and it created problems. For him, this was totally uncharted territory. I think the idea of having to go through this psychological cleansing before reaching the pomp and grandeur of the big finale was something that tortured him. He died before finishing the sketches; the last music he ever wrote was the cortege of Liù.
The task of completing the opera fell to the composer Franco Alfano, who wrote all of that duet. But his is not the version of the ending that we usually hear. On the request of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the world premiere in 1926, Alfano’s duet was cut by more than 100 bars, the remainder sewn together differently. I think that was a big mistake.
That said, the big finale is ferociously difficult to sing. It is a musical language more akin to such composers as Schreker, Szymanowski and Korngold at their most narcotic. This probably irritated Toscanini, but it turns out that he only conducted the first night, then never went near Turandot again! For our new recording we have chosen the longer version, whereas the current production at the Royal Opera, first staged in 1984, is done with Toscanini’s modified finale. It’s imperfect, but theatrically it works.
The recording, meanwhile, involved more than the usual set of challenges, as we were at the time still facing Covid-19 regulations about social distancing, which affected both the orchestra and the chorus. With the regulatory metre-and-a-half between chorus members, they were spread out along the balcony of Rome’s Santa Cecilia concert hall above the orchestra. This brought an opulence to the sound which is not unhelpful in this piece.
Both our Turandot, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Calaf, Jonas Kaufmann, were singing the roles for the first time, and I was able to push them to find the vehemence, the passion and the austerity that the piece needs. But it’s the orchestra that gives the visceral energy to the whole thing. Without that, you have nothing.
And the opera’s showstopper, Nessun Dorma? The so-called “Pavarotti effect”, the Three Tenors and the 1990 World Cup really did have an effect: this music has filtered through to a mass audience worldwide. But the aria, its vocal line soaring and flying so beautifully above the orchestra, has an elegance and a perfume all of its own that familiarity cannot dull.
Turandot is much more than Nessun Dorma – and yet to some degree it captures the spirit of the entire opera: an anxious wait to see what the future will bring, and a triumphant belief in a heroic individual’s ability to overcome the dangers and complexities of life.